Calling all prophets

Or do prophets not exist outside the Bible?

In an earlier substack I suggested new prophets must rise up when the social gospel grows weak. Calling all prophets. But can prophets exist outside a biblical world?

Prophets are hard to understand. Or endure. True, the Chinese say: “Better than the assent of the crowd is the dissent of one brave man.” True, Pascal admonished: “Trust witnesses willing to sacrifice their lives.” True, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi left their authentic marks before being martyred. But is the American vernacular, even the American religious vernacular, a mutation more suited to the new world of capitalism and national aggrandizement? Shall we go throughout the land looking for such preachers and, when we find one, call him or her?

Evidence of our distance from the prophetic voice is the incredulous American response to then candidate Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago. Though Bible-believing and biblically literate, most American Christians could not imagine anyone denouncing his own country in the name of God. Certainly not this country, the city God set on a hill for all to admire. Hillary assured everyone that Methodist preachers would never talk like that.

The recent death of Jessee Jackson is a reminder of the role of prophets in the black church, the great carrier of the prophetic tradition in America, above all in the life of Martin Luther King and his many distinguished predecessors and successors. No flag was lowered for Jackson, no building boasted his name. Savvy politicians and economic powers want to mute that tradition or lure it back onto the plantation of the status quo. Since that tradition has consistently named and condemned the sins of economic empire and white supremacy, it seemed in everyone’s interest to empty out the black prophetic tradition, to make black prophets accommodate to the existing white order. To stop telling the truth. But telling the truth is the pay grade of the prophet. In your face! With a fine ear for religious cant, prophets deplore the religious establishment whose offerings stink to high heaven. They see that white racism may properly be outed as “the original sin.” Black preachers periodically arise to keep the black rhetoric authentic.

To be sure, prophets are hard to live with. They especially grate on refined sensibilities and on self-serving patriotism as the common default outside the Bible. Americans, though not northern Europeans, cannot imagine a God who blesses social democracy while condemning the fundamentalism of free markets. The Hebrew Bible is the gold standard for the prophetic voice, but Abraham Heschel once commented that prophets in every age sing an octave too high and refuse to blend in with the choir who sing for the 1%.

So it’s hard to place the prophetic voice outside the reservation called the Bible. Is it possible, perhaps, to embrace the Bible while avoiding God’s obsession with social justice? As MAGA Christians consistently do. Is that the American default? Which is to say, cut the prophets out of sacred texts with your pen knife, as a recalcitrants king in the Old Testament once did. It was also tried by Thomas Jefferson.

Perhaps substitute the Biblical prophets with alternative prophets—prophets on the payroll. Prophets as congressional chaplains. But authentic prophets sniff out every betrayal of God’s design, so bought prophets perceive that they must divert God’s scrutiny to other targets. In the American fundamentalist tradition, prophets and prophecy typically refer to irrelevant future-tellers. Obsession with the good of the commons detours to divining the signs of the “end-times,” insider trading in esoteric knowledge about God’s plans for Jesus’ return. While at fortuitous moments in Jewish and Christian history a keen interest in divine judgment was always riveted to the unbearable present, the conservative American predilection among devout Bible-believers has been towards end-of- the-world fascinations that take their eye off the ball--the responsibility to create new heavens on this earth. Dreams of escape substitute for dreams of change. “All things are possible” is transferred to the afterlife, or to a distant millennium. “Left behind” is the title of a series of popular books and movies that display the millennial stance of conservative Christians who scorn earthly appointments as they hurry off to heaven. Very few pause to spit in the cup and send it back to Biblical texts to see if their phenotype is a match with the prophetic genome for end-times. If the old post-millennialism is now gone from the commons, a new millennialism—American nationalism—is now taking the day.

Authentic prophecy then and now starts out like this: a few simple seekers with good eyes and ears and an inquiring spirit (and a call from God) find themselves perplexed by all the things that have gone wrong in this world and look earnestly for the promised handwriting of God in history—for example now, at the beginning of the Third Millennium. Then a call from God, almost always unwelcome at first, turns them into divine messengers and social critics. They are deputized as defenders of God’s ambitions for earth and humanity. They slowly find their way as social critics and then actors in a society that has lost its moorings. They are determined to believe that history has an ultimate plot and the religious agenda is to name it. In acts of guerilla theater they play God’s dreams on public stages, often accepting bizarre roles and costumes for themselves. They mean to disturb and captivate new audiences. Like Marx, commonly called a secular prophet, they are determined to change the world. Their plots may be taken from the Exodus. They decode Exodus everywhere (as black slaves once did), announce God’s intentions, call the oppressed or the deceived to march into freedom. They insert themselves into the vortex where the forces of prophetic ministry and the lives of the disempowered swirl.

Will you be prepared to follow when they arise in our times?